Jacobean war

Wednesday 9 April 2003 23:00 BST

Taming of the Shrew

I cannot remember when the Royal Shakespeare Company last hit upon such a revelatory idea.

Director Gregory Doran has exhumed and restored to full theatrical life The Tamer Tamed (Swan Theatre), a pre-feminist farcical comedy by Shakespeare's collaborator John Fletcher, and presents it with the play that inspired it, The Taming of the Shrew. Although unperformed for two centuries, Fletcher's comedy proves in the jaunty exuberances of Doran's production to be disturbingly modern.

It also provides a theatrical antidote to the distasteful male chauvinism displayed in The Taming of the Shrew (Royal Shakespeare Theatre). The Shakespearian and Jacobean sex war, fought in battles of words, wits and weapons, will never be the same again.

The Tamer Tamed dramatically disposes of the familiar notion that Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew authoritatively voiced the period's belief in

female subservience. Fletcher borrows some of Shakespeare's characters from The Shrew and serves notice that Protestants argued women were men's spiritual equals. Petruchio, played by Jasper Britton with a nice, wounded air of self-pity but cheap bluster and no emotional conviction when he breaks down, embarks on a second marriage that leaves him overcome, outwitted and humiliated by his cleverer wife, Maria.

There is an eerie, culminating moment in The Tamer Tamed, a turning of tables that avenges Katherine's last, cowed speech of submission in The Taming of the Shrew. Alexandra Gilbreath's Maria stands over the weeping Petruchio, pretending to be dead in a silly attempt to win her sympathy. "I've tam'd ye and now am vow'd your servant," Miss Gilbreath coos in her low, affected tones.

But exciting though it is to discover a play that dramatises a little-known aspect of Jacobean sensibility, Doran's farcically over-tilted production is not that persuasive, even though Britton's bemused Petruchio attracts outbreaks of laughter when he appeals direct for audience sympathy.

Yet whether it is Maria making a mockery of her weeping husband, her cousin Bianca and women dancing and singing their defiance of men, or Livia pretending to be ill or her nervy lover Rowland (promising Daniel Brocklebank), they all appear jovially pretending rather than genuine about their emotions. I have similar, far stronger reservations about Doran's incredibly weak production of The Taming of the Shrew.

The Christopher Sly Induction, which enables the play to be understood as a game of illusion, pretence and disguise, is cut. And as if ignoring decades of critical theory about the play's grim sexual politics and psychology Doran passes off The Taming of the Shrew as a farcical romp in which Britton's unfrightening Petruchio roars and blusters on Stephen Brimson Lewis's set, which consists of many hanging doors.

Twice Britton softens his voice when he and Katherine are alone, as if to signal he is only playing tough. Miss Gilbreath, with a lopsided walk, wild hair, fog-horn voice and a mad tendency to hurl things around disastrously makes her Shrew a crazy, farcical turn.